together. During the spring of 1997, I drew circles and lines on the map—school, Bachman Recreation Center, routes to work. All pointers intersected at a block of older apartments just a short hike from

Gooch Elementary, Ben’s school. The once-proud apartments, gone to seed and drug dealers, were being gutted and renovated, like me.

Southern-mansion style, low-rise, verandas, hanging gardens, oversized rooms, lavish space; real plaster on the foot-thick walls, steel and brick superstructure built to last a century. Bay windows looking out on the oak-shaded lawn. Playground and a swimming pool just around the corner. Foliage at the bottom of the stairs where Sue could plant a garden.

We rented a three-bedroom apartment on the second floor: master for Sue, study/bedroom for me, cubby for Ben. My Mom and

Dad bought us a new washer and dryer set, blessing our reunion.

The dining room table doubled as Ben’s therapy desk, where trainers could sit. Searching the Salvation Army for treasures, I selected a Queen Anne sofa and matching chair recovered in green fleur-delis. I paid from my savings and offered it as a gift to Sue, an open hope chest. She branded the living room with a red fleur-de-lis mismatched chair. Her mark.

Breastmilk is alive and life-giving like a white blood transfusion to your baby.

The best time to begin breastfeeding is right after birth while your newborn is alert. Help your baby latch on properly by getting the whole areola (brown circle with the nipple) in your baby’s mouth.The suction action of your baby helps to contract your uterus (along with external massage below your belly button) which is important to reduce bleeding.

Colostrum, the clear fluid before your milk comes in, is the perfect food for a newborn.

Your milk comes in within a few days.The more often you feed, the less discomfort you’ll have from engorgement, and the more milk you provide your baby. Engorgement, a normal fullness or swelling of the breasts, occurs when you first begin producing milk. Breastfeeding as often as possible relieves the pressure. Ice packs also offer relief. Don’t give formula supplements or water to your baby for the first three to four weeks.

“In fact,” Yusuf replied, “Avi will tell you that his most common justification style invites him to go soft.”

The group looked over at Avi.

“True,” Avi nodded. “Shall I share some thoughts about it?” he asked Yusuf.

“Please.”

“When we find justification in softness,” Avi began, “it’s usually because we’re carrying around a third basic kind of justification box, a box we call the must-be-seen-as box.

“It looks something like this:”

THE MUST-BE-SEEN-AS BOX

View of MyselfNeed to be well thought of Fake

View of OthersJudgmental Threatening My audience

FeelingsAnxious/Afraid Needy/Stressed Overwhelmed

View of WorldDangerous Watching Judging me

“When I’m carrying around this kind of justification box,” Avi said, as he finished up the diagram, “I might be worried about being seen as likable, for example. Such a box will keep me from being able to do the helpful and right thing when the helpful or right thing might be something the other person won’t like. Let me give you an example of that.

“Early on in our time here at Camp Moriah,” he began, “I hired a man named Jack as our field director—the person who runs everything out on the trail with the youth. It didn’t take me too long to discover I had made a mistake. It turned out that Jack was a very poor manager of people. He had an ill temper and always blamed problems on others. He carried a better-than box that made out everyone he worked with to be inferior. As a result, he dismissed criticism out of hand, blamed every failure on others, and generally treated his coworkers with indifference and disdain. He was creating problems everywhere. I saw what was going on, of course, and knew that if he was ever going to make it here, he simply would have to change the way he worked and the way he managed. But you know what? I never said anything to him about it. He had a pretty volatile personality, and I was afraid to confront him with the problem. So I didn’t. Instead, I just started hoping he would move or decide to take another job!”

In a perfect world, you could trust that all things are safe for you. In reality, we have been blessed with a curious and discerning brain and a woman’s remarkable intuition to help us make safe decisions for ourselves.You have a choice in pregnancy and birth: either get informed and make decisions or remain naive.

If you favor natural birth, do you want an experienced caregiver, personal service or straight-forward care? In selecting the right physician or midwife at the right hospital, birth center, or a home birth, consider the following questions.

Having a Baby? 10 Questions to Ask

Have you decided how to have your baby? The choice is yours.

First, learn as much as you can about all your choices.There are many different ways of caring for you and your baby during labor and birth.

Birthing care that is better and healthier for mothers and babies is called “mother-friendly.” Some birth places or settings are more motherfriendly than others and that’s important to your outcome.When you are deciding where to have your baby, you can choose from different places such as a:

My earnest involvement in family activism, even though I didn’t identify it as such, began when I was twenty-six years old. That is when I decided to consciously apply my knowledge about communication and organizing to make my family more united, nurturing, and mutually supportive, including my networks of friends and colleagues whom I also considered as family. My thought was to strengthen my immediate community so we could be more available to create positive change in our society. During these years, there was no articulated idea of family activism, just a handful of friends believing that a better world somehow begins with healthier families, so we just learned from our doing. Now, as I reflect on my activism thirty years later, I recognize that I was largely guided by five key foundational principles.

These five principles represent my basic philosophy about how to advance a world that works for all, beginning with co-powering family and friends to become part of the force of love and transformation. By no means are these principles fully inclusive of all ideas required for change and transformation, yet they provide an important beginning for those who seek to make our families, communities, and societies better for everyone. They provide an understanding of the “know why” that underlies the methods and tools imparted in this book.

To be a successful family activist and create the change we desire in the world requires preparation and grounding. This involves connecting with what nurtures your spirit and energy. It involves living with integrity, health, and the feeling of success in fulfilling your goals and objectives. It also involves lasting the distance by living with balance so that you never give up your vision and continue inspiring others to be their best. To sustain this effort we must prepare ourselves for a life of personal joy and service.

The success I live today I credit to a combination of good fortune, the connection I made to my spirit, and preparation. I was fortunate to have had caring people and experiences that pointed me in the right direction and taught me that life success requires ongoing learning. Interestingly, that which we do to prepare ourselves for personal success or to be effective family activists also primes us to be better supporters and teachers for our family and friends as well.

While some kinds of abilities remain stable or even decline as you age, your ability to be people smart can grow continuously. That’s the good news. The bad news is, it won’t be easy. We adults are often not open to change. If you don’t believe this, try this simple experiment:

Fold your arms without thinking. Now, fold them the opposite way so that you switch which arm is on top. Feel awkward? You bet. Well, stay that way for a minute. Now, cross your legs without thinking about it. Yep, the upper part of your body is still uncomfortable but your lower part is nice and comfortable. Now cross your legs the opposite way. Your whole body is now out of your comfort zone. Now go back to the way you normally fold your arms and cross your legs. Feel better? That’s the real you. It’s comfortable to do things in familiar ways.

For better or worse, we have gotten used not only to folding our arms and crossing our legs in certain ways, but to relating to other people in certain ways. And it will be uncomfortable to change.

I was grateful for the simple question and felt the life come back to my face. “Why, yes, one actually. His name is Todd. He’s 16.”

Bud smiled. “Do you remember how you felt when Todd was born—how it seemed to change your perspective on life?”

I strained to find my way back to the memories of Todd’s birth—through the pain, through the heartache. Diagnosed at a fairly young age with attention deficit disorder, he had been a difficult child, and my wife, Laura, and I clashed constantly over what to do with him. Things had only gotten worse as he grew older. Todd and I didn’t have much of a relationship. But at Bud’s invitation, I attempted a remembrance of the time and emotion surrounding his birth. “Yes, I remember,” I began pensively. “I remember holding him close, pondering my hope for his life—feeling inadequate, even overwhelmed, but at the same time grateful.” The memory lessened for a moment the pain I felt in the present.

“That was the way it was for me too,” Bud said. “Would you mind if I told you a story that began with the birth of my first child, David?”

Milan McCorquodale is a very determined young man. He wanted a basketball scholarship. No matter that he wasn’t exceptionally tall—he had talent. He worked hard, practicing day and night, and he earned the coveted scholarship. Graduating from high school, he looked forward to playing four years of collegiate basketball at an Alabama university. It was not to be. A car crash sent him to the hospital with traumatic brain injury. “. . . kind of like a stroke on both sides of the brain,” his mother,

Christa McCorquodale, described the damage.

Milan spent close to four months in a coma. One morning his nurse walked into his hospital room and said, “Good morning, Milan.” Her patient answered, “Good morning.”

“The nurse just about fainted,” McCorquodale said. “Milan didn’t speak again for a while. But those two words showed us that he was still with us.”

After Milan came out of the coma, and was able to leave the hospital, he began physical, occupational, and speech therapy, which he continues as of this writing. However, there was no NARHA center within driving distance where he could start a program of equine therapy.1

In a perfect world, you could trust that all things are safe for you. In reality, we have been blessed with a curious and discerning brain and a woman’s remarkable intuition to help us make safe decisions for ourselves. You have a choice in pregnancy and birth: either get informed and make decisions or remain naive.

If you favor natural birth, do you want an experienced caregiver, personal service or straight-forward care? In selecting the right physician or midwife at the right hospital, birth center, or a home birth, consider the following questions.

Having a Baby? 10 Questions to Ask

Have you decided how to have your baby? The choice is yours.

First, learn as much as you can about all your choices. There are many different ways of caring for you and your baby during labor and birth.

rented a suite in the back wing of Rainbow Apartments, an outof-the-way, sunny third-floor location where Ben’s tantrums would be shielded, I hoped, from the prying eyes of neighbors and Child

Protective Services.

Catherine Maurice described the staffing procedure, and it sounded straightforward enough. I was going to need six therapists working in shifts for a total of forty hours a week. Recruit college psychology students. Pay double minimum wage. Train them myself.

I set myself a goal. By noon, I would write six letters to the psychology departments of local universities, asking them to post a help-wanted notice on their bulletin boards.

I wrote out a task list:

1. Look up the universities.

2. Make the mailing list.

3. Address the envelopes.

4. Call the departments.

I froze. This can’t possibly work, I thought. The secretary who’d answer the phone would not understand what I was talking about.

Your son is what? Autistic? And you want to recover him? Ah-ha-haha-ha-ha-ha. Autistic children don’t recover. No, you may not speak

Sam slept until eight or nine in the morning, which gave me one or two precious hours to clean the house or get some arts council work done before caring for him consumed the rest of my day. I had to help him dress and make his breakfast. He could undress himself better than he could dress himself. He could feed himself, but he ignored his spoon and fork. Still, he ate a healthy breakfast—whole-grain pancakes or waffles, fresh berries, scrambled eggs, and smoothies.

For juice and smoothies, I bought a bottle-to-cup system I had seen in Japan. My mentor’s daughter, Akiko, was a toddler. I had enjoyed watching Akiko grow and change. Even though Akiko wasn’t quite two years old, Toru and Chieko had encouraged her to pick up grains of rice with chopsticks.

Akiko also liked to play with me. Occasionally, I understood her Japanese better than that of the adults, but she couldn’t pronounce my name. As I tried to learn Japanese myself, I figured out that my name didn’t fit in the natural building blocks of the Japanese alphabet. Akiko adapted by taking the sound of the first letter, P, and adding the honorary suffix, san, to be polite. My name was Pe-san when we played. Akiko’s favorite cup had been a short, sturdy one with white handles on both sides. Chieko showed me the different options for its top— with a quick twist, the cup changed from a bottle-style nipple to a sipper, to a straw, to a covered top with a small hole to slow down spills.

Belonging creates and undoes us both. Agreement has rarely been the mandate for people who love each other. Maybe on some things, but actually, when you look at some people who are lovers and friends, actually they might disagree really deeply on things, but they’re somehow—I like the phrase “the argument of being alive.” Or in Irish, when you talk about trust, there’s a beautiful phrase from West Kerry where you say, “Mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne,” “You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.” And that is soft and kind language, but it is so robust. That is what we can have with each other.

— PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA

Corrymeela is the oldest peace and reconciliation organization in Northern Ireland. Located in the Northern Ireland village of Ballycastle, Corrymeela began before “the troubles” and continued on in Northern Ireland’s changing postconflict society after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. The organization has grown and now has almost forty full-time staff and dozens of volunteers who work with the 11,000 people who attend programs at the center every year.

If we invited you to free associate to the word conflict, would you think of war, destruction, divorce, turmoil? Probably many people would. Even as we write this, the effects of conflict cast shadows on the world: children murdered, people hated because they are different, nations torn apart over ethnic and racial feuding. It is hardly surprising that many wish that life could be entirely free of conflict.144

Of course, this is impossible. As long as there are differences among people, there will be conflicts and competing interests. This is not entirely bad: Out of conflicts have come our most enduring institutions, governments, and religions. Nations have all been forged out of the struggle to express our needs, resolve our disputes, and accept our differences. Like sun and rain or day and night, conflict is part of the rhythm of life. Our challenge is to master it and grow through it.

line of yellow beads up and down the thick, cherry-red wire mounted on a sturdy pine base. She sat next to him and began to narrate his play in the same quiet, deliberate way she had first talked with me on the phone. I had seen that kind of toy only a few times before. Even as an adult, I found moving the beads felt soothing and purposeful.

“Just describe what he’s doing. He’ll make the connections between the words you’re using and what they’re for. This toy is good for eye-hand coordination and visual tracking—the kind of motor skills he will need to learn to read.”

I began to wonder whether I was Sam’s problem. Of course,

Sam wasn’t talking because I wasn’t a chatty mother. My quiet love wasn’t enough. I should be walking up and down the aisles of the grocery store going on about red apples, and green peas, and orange oranges, I thought. That must be why he doesn’t know his colors. I didn’t coo. I didn’t baby talk. I didn’t refer to myself in the third person.